Mario Merz Prize

Edition 3

Art

Mircea Cantor

Mircea Cantor (Romania, 1977) lives and works on Earth

Mircea Cantor makes films and sculptural installations that often elaborate on uncertainty, countering prevailing notions that everything can be known or predicted. He aroused international attention in the early 2000s with works, such as The Landscape Is Changing (2003), a film depicting demonstrators carrying large mirrors instead of slogans as they walked through the streets of Tirana, and Deeparture (2005), a film that chronicles the encounter between a wolf and a deer inside an empty gallery space. Cantor’s work, which regularly offers subtle critiques on the architecture of power, is equally centered on unveiling methods of empirical engagement with objects and images through a sustained long-term examination. More recently Cantor has taken up the question craftsmanship and tradition to relating the “intuitive” energy that tests how different fields of knowledge might make sense of human creation and the multiplicity of perspectives that inform our understanding of our relationship to time, consciousness, and experience.